Conventionally, a mobile commerce service may be conducted through partnership among various service providers (SPs), such as financial institutions, transportation companies, and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to provide various services to the general public.
However, partnerships formed among various SPs and MNOs may be limited due to inherent conflicting business interests among entities that are involved. For example, a specific SP such as MasterCard® may not want to share sensitive information related to one of its clients to a competing SP like Visa®.
In addition, there may be some technical incompatibilities, which may limit partnerships among the various entities that are involved. Due to this incompatibilities, user may have several accounts for various SPs on the user's mobile terminal. In addition, a user may be unable to access certain SPs, if the mobile communication network that user is subscribed to does not support interconnection with other SPs.
FIG. 1 is a view illustrating a conventional relationship between various entities in a mobile communication network.
As shown in FIG. 1, a plurality of users or customers with mobile terminals equipped with Secure Element (SE) may interact with a single or multiple SPs and/or MNOs. Since a user or a customer may interact with SPs and/or MNOs directly, an account may be created for each SP and/or MNO. However, as entities may desire not to share confidential information with other entities in the mobile communication network, a single unified account or point of contact to facilitate transactions with the illustrated entities may be difficult to achieve.
In addition, since certain mobile terminals or SEs such as Subscriber Identity Module (SIM), Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM), embedded SE, and other forms of SEs may not support operations of selecting SPs and/or MNOs, interoperability may be limited.